The Global Women’s
Water Initiative Team has been traveling through East Africa to visit the women
teams that were trained in our 2011-2012 year long training program. Meet the
people whose lives they are changing.
GWWI Team - Gemma
Bulos, Director; Rose Wamalwa, Kenya/Tanzania Field Coordinator; Comfort
Mukasa, Uganda Field Coordinator
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| Mary in her organic garden |
Meet Mary, a businesswoman who sells clothes in a small shop
and lives in a small house in Matejo, a slum area in Arusha, Tanzania. A few
years back she had an operation on her back and was advised by her doctor to
take safe water only. She was also told not to take boiled or bottled
water. Following her doctor’s unusual prescription,
she sought alternative options to treat her water. After trying a few local options and not
liking them because they still made her nauseous, she found out about the
Biosand water filter from Anna Anatoli of ANEPO, a GWWI graduate who was selling
this new water treatment in Arusha.
Anna learned how to build the Biosand Filter at the GWWI
Women and Water Training and brought it back to her community to start a small
micro-enterprise.
Mary attended an ANEPO Health and Wellness Training which
was a 2-day Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Training educating the
community about the benefits of good hygiene, promoting the Biosand filters
(BSF) as an option for clean water, and the benefits of planting organic food
for healthy eating. Here she learned how important it was not only to have safe
water for drinking, but for cooking, cleaning dishes, hand washing and bathing.
Mary was immediately impressed by the BSF because it could remove up to 97-99%
of bacteria and it could produce over 100 liters of water per day – enough for
her whole family to have safe water for all their water-related activities.
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| Mary's son next to the BSF with a safe storage container on top |
Before buying the Biosand Filter, when someone in her family
fell sick from typhoid from the contaminated tap water piped to her house from
the municipality, she would end up spending much of her pay on treatment, which
made it difficult for her to save money. Because she had 14 people living in
her household, she could spend sometimes up to 500,000TSH (approx.: $350) per
week on medicines and hospital visits – not to mention lost wages from missing
work. After having the BSF for 7 months, there has not been one incidence of
typhoid in her family since they installed the filter.
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| GWWI African Field Team with Mary and neighbors |
Mary is so grateful to have been relieved from the financial
burdens of water related illnesses that have held herself and her family back
from opportunities. Based on ANEPOs
Health and Wellness Program she also learned how to grow organic vegetables in
recycled grain bags in the small spaces in front of and next to her home.
Thanks to GWWI graduate Anna Anatoli and ANEPO, Mary has clean water, healthy
food and is thriving!
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